financial cost may have reached thirty billion dollars, wiping out a
substantial portion of the total capital wealth of Europe.

Even such massive losses do not begin to suggest the full scope of the
ruin. One of the considerations that long held back President Woodrow
Wilson from proposing to the United States Congress the declaration of war
that had by then become virtually inescapable was his awareness of the
moral damage that would ensue. Not the least of the distinctions that
characterized this extraordinary man--a statesman whose vision both
'Abdu'l-Baha and Shoghi Effendi have praised--was his understanding of the
brutalization of human nature that would be the worst legacy of the
tragedy that was by then engulfing Europe, a legacy beyond human capacity
to reverse.(38)

Reflection on the magnitude of the suffering experienced by humankind in
the war's four years--and the resulting setback to the long, painful
process of the civilizing of human nature--lends tragic force to words the
Master had addressed only two or three years earlier to audiences in such
European cities as London, Paris, Vienna, Budapest and Stuttgart, as well
as in North America. Speaking one evening in the home of Mr. and Mrs.
Sutherland Maxwell in Montreal, He had said:

Today the world of humanity is walking in darkness because it is out of
touch with the world of God. That is why we do not see the signs of God in
the hearts of men. The power of the Holy Spirit has no influence. When a
divine spiritual illumination becomes manifest in the world of humanity,
when divine instruction and guidance appear, then enlightenment follows, a
new spirit is realized within, a new power descends, and a new life is
given. It is like the birth from the animal kingdom into the kingdom of
man.... I will pray, and you must pray, likewise, that such heavenly
bounty may be realized; that strife and enmity may be banished, warfare
and bloodshed taken away; that hearts may attain ideal communication and
that all people may drink from the same fountain.(39)

The vindictive peace treaty, imposed by the Allied powers on their
defeated enemies, succeeded only, as both 'Abdu'l-Baha and Shoghi Effendi
have pointed out, in planting the seeds of another, far more terrible
conflict. The ruinous reparations demanded of the vanquished --and the
injustice that required them to accept the full guilt for a war for which
all parties had been, to one degree or another, responsi